Jennifer McQuiston's Blog

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I am so excited to announce that today is finally the release day for Diary of an Accidental Wallflower!
It seems like I’ve been waiting forever for my new series to start, but it’s finally here.

Pretty and popular, Miss Clare Westmore knows exactly what (or rather, who) she wants: the next Duke of Harrington. But when she twists her ankle on the eve of the Season’s most touted event, Clare is left standing in the wallflower line … and watching her best friend dance away with her duke.

Dr. Daniel Merial is tempted to deliver more than a diagnosis to the fuming young lady, but he doesn’t have time for distractions, even one so delectable. So why can’t he stop thinking about her?

All Clare wants to do is return to the dance floor, but instead of flirting in ballrooms, she’s confined by her ankle to her drawing room, with only Dr. Merial’s visits to look forward to. As her former friends position themselves to knock Clare permanently out of place, she realizes with horror she is falling for her doctor instead her duke.

When her ankle finally heals and she faces her old life again, will she throw herself back into the game?   Or will her time in the wallflower line have given her a glimpse of who she was really meant to be?

And if you’ve been wanting an introduction to Miss Clare Westmore, our socialite-turned-wallflower heroine, here’s a fun little video to get you warmed up.

It’s what I imagine Clare thinks wallflowers do…. that is, until she discovers there’s a little wallflower in her too!
Happy Reading everyone!

I like books.

And when I say books, I mean ALL books. Novellas to Tomes, Biographies to Cookbooks, Literary Fiction to Romance, Young Adult to Very Adult, Inspirational to Murder Mystery.

Now, it may seem that perhaps I cannot make up my mind, but the truth is that I simply enjoy a good story, told in all its myriad forms.

And this year, you can find them all at the 2014 Decatur Book Festival.

The largest independent book festival in the United States, the Decatur Book Festival is a veritable orgy of good reading, author meet-and-greets, and street food. The annual event is part street festival / part literary festival, and best of all it’s in my own backyard. There’s a fun children’s parade on Saturday where all the kids dress in character. There’s a writer’s conference where you can workshop your writing. There’s every category of book you can imagine.

And this year, for the first time in a long time, there will also be Romance.

Georgia Romance Writers is proud to be sponsoring this year’s Romance track at the Decatur Book Festival. There is a beautiful lineup of authors including Rachel Gibson, J. Lynn, Cathy Maxwell, Nicki Salcedo, Wendy Wax… and oh, yeah! Me! I am thrilled to announce I will be on two panels this year, with other fantastic authors.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

GRW is also sponsoring a tent (see tents 413 to 416) where we will have more  author panels and some fun giveaways, and we cannot wait to see you there!

So mark your calendars, dust off those sneakers, and come out to Decatur August 30th and August 31st!  And if you see someone wearing a green Tshirt with the Georgia Romance Writers logo on it, be sure to stop them and say hello.

We will be happy to tell you why we read ALL books…and why you should too.

I am so, so excited to share with you the fabulous new cover for the first book in my new series, The Seduction Diaries! Diary of an Accidental Wallflower will be released on February 24, 2015 (available for Pre-Order now on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Kobo, and Indie-bound). It is a fun and flirtatious book set in Victorian London with a “Mean Girls Meets Grey’s Anatomy” vibe, and it was wickedly fun to write.

Pretty and popular, Miss CLARE WESTMORE knows exactly what (or rather, who) she wants: the next Duke of Harrington. If she can just keep her embarrassing family under wraps and her future duke on her dance card, she will be well on her way to becoming a duchess. But when she twists her ankle on the eve of the Season’s most touted event, Clare is left standing in the wallflower line … and watching her best friend dance away with her duke.

Dr. DANIEL MERIAL knows a thing or two about anatomy, and he diagnoses London’s most unlikely wallflower with a serious sprain. He’s tempted to deliver more than a diagnosis to the fuming young lady, but he doesn’t have time for distractions, even one so delectable. She is too young, too innocent, and too fashionable to be worth a second look.

So why can’t he stop thinking about her?

All Clare wants to do is return to the dance floor, but instead of flirting in ballrooms, she’s confined by her ankle to her drawing room, with only Dr. Merial’s visits to look forward to. As her former friends position themselves to knock Clare permanently out of place, she realizes with horror she is falling for her doctor instead her duke. When her ankle finally heals and she faces her old life again, will she throw herself back into the game?

Or will her time in the wallflower line have given her a glimpse of who she was really meant to be?

Available for Pre-Order now!

Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Kobo, and Indie-bound

It’s summer! (I know. Technically, summer doesn’t start until June 21st, but I am ignoring you in the interest of making my summer as long as possible.)
And given the winter we had, who ISN’T ready for your own slice of summer?!


You are probably already planning (or imagining) your beach vacation. (And of course, we all look just like this in our Miracle Suit one-pieces, am I right?)


The kids are out of school (well, MINE are, so don’t rain on my happy parade!)

There will be neighborhood BBQs and parties.


And of course….reading!


No, not that kind of reading. THIS kind of reading.

About this…

And this…

And of course, this.

To celebrate summer, SUMMER IS FOR LOVERS e-books are on sale for $0.99!
This is for a limited time, so get your copy now!
Buy Link: Amazon
Buy Link: Barnes and Noble

All About Romance calls SUMMER IS FOR LOVERS “The Perfect Beach Read”.

Smart Bitches Trashy Books gave SUMMER IS FOR LOVERS a coveted A rating, saying,    ”This is the sort of book I want to take on vacation to the Caribbean with me.”

Enjoying your own copy of SUMMER IS FOR LOVERS?
Post a picture to Facebook or Twitter of where you are reading it (and e-readers count too!), TAG ME, and then email me at jen@jenmcquiston.com, and I will mail you your very own coozie to keep those summer drinks nice and cool.
 Tags for Twitter = @jenmcqwrites
Tags for Facebook = www.facebook.com/jennifermcquistonauthor

Most of all, enjoy your beach reads, and have fun this summer!

 

Moonlight on My Mind is finally here!

I am SO excited to bless and release this book!

Not only to see what readers think of the murder-mystery storyline (did I do it right? Could you guess the killer?), but to see what you think of the wild emotional ride to a Happily Ever After that I gave the primary characters, Patrick Channing (the veterinarian you first met in What Happens in Scotland) and Miss Julianne Baxter (the Society busybody you met in Summer is for Lovers). These two are polar opposites in temperament, and I’ve tossed them together in a “marriage of inconvenience.”

Let the fireworks begin!

Purchase on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Books-A-Million, Indie-Bound, and Bookish.

Sample the First Chapter HERE:

To ruin a man’s life once takes a regrettable mistake.

To do so twice takes a woman like Julianne Baxter.

Eleven months ago, Julianne’s statement to the authorities wrongly implicated Patrick, the new Earl of Haversham, in his older brother’s death. The chit is as much trouble as her red hair suggests, and just as captivating. Now she has impetuously tracked him to the wilds of Scotland, insisting that he return home to face a murder charge and save his family from ruin. A clandestine wedding may be the only way to save her reputation—and his neck from the hangman’s noose.

Julianne has no objection to the match. More and more she’s convinced of Patrick’s innocence, though when it comes to igniting her passions, the man is all too guilty. And if they can only clear his name, a marriage made in haste could bring about the most extraordinary pleasure…

But really, beyond my own giddiness, it’s an exciting day for all of us! Truly, if you are a historical romance reader, you are probably reeling this week. The list of amazing authors whose books are out this week is at least a mile long… Julie Anne Long, Eloisa James, Maya Rodale, Elizabeth Essex, Meredith Duran, and Vicky Dreiling, to name but a few.

And lookie there… that handy B&N credit just popped up in my In-box. Excuse me while I go shopping, and spend my windfall!

Happy Reading,

Jenni McQ

I am excited to announce that Avon has arranged a blog tour to celebrate the upcoming release of Moonlight on My Mind (which will be out March 25, 2014). The tour features a fun giveaway, including: Print Copies of WHAT HAPPENS IN SCOTLAND and SUMMER IS FOR LOVERS, A Pack of Mother Mae’s Chocolate Chip Scottish Shortbread Mix, and a Delightful Ceramic Shortbread Pan.

This is a cumulative giveaway, so follow along at all the stops to increase your chances of winning. Happy reading!

About Moonlight on My Mind:

Available for Pre-Order now on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Books-A-Million, Indie-Bound, and Bookish. Sample the First Chapter HERE:

To ruin a man’s life once takes a regrettable mistake.

To do so twice takes a woman like Julianne Baxter.

Eleven months ago, Julianne’s statement to the authorities wrongly implicated Patrick, the new Earl of Haversham, in his older brother’s death. The chit is as much trouble as her red hair suggests, and just as captivating. Now she has impetuously tracked him to the wilds of Scotland, insisting that he return home to face a murder charge and save his family from ruin. A clandestine wedding may be the only way to save her reputation—and his neck from the hangman’s noose.

Julianne has no objection to the match. More and more she’s convinced of Patrick’s innocence, though when it comes to igniting her passions, the man is all too guilty. And if they can only clear his name, a marriage made in haste could bring about the most extraordinary pleasure…

 

*This interview first appeared on the Dashing Duchesses*

A Duchess does not gush, but if this one did, it would surely be over Donna Thorland’s newest historical fiction novel, THE REBEL PIRATE. I previously interviewed Donna for her debut novel, The Turncoat, and I’ve been eagerly awaiting her next book for over a year. Once it made its way into my grasping, gloved hands, I found myself tearing through it.

Which means I will probably need to read it again, this time chewing between swallows.

Donna: Thank you! The gushing is mutual. Summer is for Lovers was my favorite romance of 2013. (To which Jennifer promptly blushes)

1775, Boston Harbor. James Sparhawk, Master and Commander in the British Navy, knows trouble when he sees it. The ship he’s boarded is carrying ammunition and gold…into a country on the knife’s edge of war. Sparhawk’s duty is clear: confiscate the cargo, impound the vessel and seize the crew. But when one of the ship’s boys turns out to be a lovely girl, with a loaded pistol and dead-shot aim, Sparhawk finds himself held hostage aboard a Rebel privateer.

Sarah Ward never set out to break the law. Before Boston became a powder keg, she was poised to escape the stigma of being a notorious pirate’s daughter by wedding Micah Wild, one of Salem’s most successful merchants. Then a Patriot mob destroyed her fortune and Wild played her false by marrying her best friend and smuggling a chest of Rebel gold aboard her family’s ship.

Now branded a pirate herself, Sarah will do what she must to secure her family’s safety and her own future. Even if that means taking part in the cat and mouse game unfolding in Boston Harbor, the desperate naval fight between British and Rebel forces for the materiel of war—and pitting herself against James Sparhawk, the one man she cannot resist.

 

Q1: Donna, I am not exaggerating when I say I could not read this book fast enough. The flavor of The Rebel Pirate has strong echoes of your first book, primarily in your gritty attention to historical detail, and the fact that it features an indomitable heroine. But in reading it, I also felt it was remarkably different. In the Turncoat, the heroine, Kate Grey, starts off as a dowdy Quaker pacifist and ends up a lavishly dressed Rebel spy, volunteering out of loyalty to her country. In contrast, in The Rebel Pirate, Sarah Ward undergoes almost the opposite transformation: she starts off as a fashionable, jilted lover, betrayed and impoverished by her former fiancé, and transforms into a reluctant rebel only out of loyalty to her family. Did you set out to write these characters so similarly, but with such polarizing motivations?

Donna: Yes! I did set out to write two very different journeys for my heroines. I hope readers enjoy them both. One of the most relatable characteristics a heroine can have is common sense, so that was my gift to Kate and Sarah. My job as an author, though, is to make life hell for my characters, to throw every obstacle that I can in their way, so that bequest of common sense was about the last nice thing I did for them.

Of course, common sense in a rural Quaker and common sense in a pirate’s daughter mean two different things. Kate Grey knew how to manage a small farm and because she lived in a close-knit rural community, she understood people in a Miss-Marple-small-village kind of way. That was what made her—once she got a glamorous makeover—a good spy. Sarah, though, is from a thriving seaport and has an old sea dog for a father, so common sense for her means packing a pistol in her sewing bag.

With Sarah’s journey I had a bit of a head start, because I’d spent seven years managing the historic houses at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, America’s most successful pirate—cough, privateer—port. I knew the lives of the wives and daughters of these sea rogues intimately, and I wanted to plot a course that would take one of them from the comfort of her parlor with its Chinese porcelain and French wallpaper and damask sofas to the shifting deck of a twenty-four gun privateer.

 

Q2: Family is everything to Sarah Ward, especially the protective instincts she feels for her younger brother and her ailing father. Why did you choose to make family love and loyalty as much a central theme in this book as romantic love?

Donna: Familial love is part of the romance of the colonial American seaport. When you spend time in 18th century New England houses—I’ve managed a few and live in one now—you discover that they were often multi-generational households, with grandparents jostling elbows with newlyweds.

And your grandfather was as likely to have sailed with Calico Jack and Anne Bonny as to have traded for tea in India or pepper in Jakarta.

Most importantly to the romantic love front and center in The Rebel Pirate, though, family is what James Sparhawk never had. It’s one of the ways that Sarah Ward completes him.

 

Q3: Readers of romance should approach this book with eager caution: there is a strong love story to uncover, but the book itself is better classified as romantic fiction. Donna, both of your books have featured love triangles (and in the case of The Rebel Pirate, possibly more of a love rectangle). I do believe it is possible for a woman to feel attraction for one man, even as she falls in love with another. Why is this approach every bit as valid as classic romance?

Donna: I’m aspiring to write a love trapezoid next!

Just kidding. I think a well-executed love triangle can strengthen the happily-ever-after. It can give us the certainty we want to feel when we put the book down that this couple will be together in twenty years. When the heroine has other suitors, she has the opportunity to explore other futures for herself, so that when she picks the hero, she’s making a definitive choice. O r, as this 18th century posy ring says: ‘Many are the stars I see but in my eye no star like thee’

 

Q4: You have described yourself as writing “swash-bucklers”. What makes a good swash-buckler, both in movies and literature?

Donna: There are soooo many delicious swashbuckling ingredients to choose from that I’ll try to limit myself to a short list.

1) A hero who has been cheated of his birthright and must reclaim it. Think Robin of Locksley.

2) A hero imprisoned unjustly. Think The Count of Monte Cristo or Captain Blood.

3) Swordplay. Lots of it. Bonus points if anyone swings from a chandelier, or from the rigging to board an enemy ship.

4) Beautiful, clever, dangerous women. Think Milady DeWinter in The Three Musketeers.

5) Oh, and, yes, a Revolution is always a terrific backdrop. Think Scaramouche or The Scarlet Pimpernel.

 

Q5: Let’s talk movie trailers. (For those of you who don’t know, I initially discovered Donna as a result of her lush, sweeping, cinematic trailer for The Turncoat.) WHEN IN THE DEUCES WILL THE TRAILER BE OUT FOR THE REBEL PIRATE??? Please, please, please tell me you filmed it on a ship in Salem’s harbor, and that you have a friend in your pocket to play the part of James Sparhawk (and who is every bit as dreamy as the hero you feature in your first trailer.) And how come you didn’t ask me to be in it? Because you know, I have a horse and a corset. Surely the rest can be improvised.

Donna: Hang onto the horse and the corset for the next book, because we’re planning something special for MISTRESS FIREBRAND…In the meantime, however, for THE REBEL PIRATE we made a series of Vine videos for sharing on Twitter. Please RT these and spread the word.

This book is librarian-endorsed and pirate-approved.

https://vine.co/v/hLHrH3xlwvQ

https://vine.co/v/hLXXFFIbBQ9

 

Readers who want more can find Donna at www.donnathorland.com, follow her on Twitter @donnathorland, and Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/donna.thorland.

 

When she’s not gushing, Jennifer McQuiston writes Different. Historical. Romance. and appreciates all the pirates (and yummy heroes) she can get.

As a lead-up to the release of the third and final book in my debut series, Avon has scheduled me for a series of fun blogs stops with Tasty Book Tours. For those of you who like to follow along, buckle your seat belts! I look forward to seeing you!

Feb 24th- Literary, Etc- Promo

(Stop 2) Wonderful World of Imagination- Promo/Excerpt

Feb 25th- Girl Meets Books- Promo/Excerpt

(Stop 2) Never Squat with You Spurs On- Excerpt/Promo

Feb 26th- Buried Under Romance- Promo/Excerpt/Review (Summer is for Lovers)

Feb 27th- Manga Maniac Café- Promo

Feb 28th- 3 Partners in Shopping- Promo

(Stop 2) Paws and Print- Promo

March 3rd- Book Liaison- Promo/Excerpt

March 4th- Christine’s Words- Promo/Excerpt

March 5th- Racing to Read- Review

March 6th- Crystal Blogs Books- Review (What Happens in Scotland)

March 7th- Blue Rose Romance- Promo/Excerpt

March 10th- My Written Romance- Promo

March 11th- Brooke Blogs- Excerpt/Promo

March 12th- I am, Indeed- Excerpt/Review (What Happens in Scotland)

March 13th- Imagine a World- Promo/Excerpt

March 14th- Ramblings From This Chick- Promo

Introducing the new book trailer for Moonlight on My Mind, out 3/25/14.

Available for Pre-Order now on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Books-A-Million, Indie-Bound, and Bookish.